Supernatural 6.16: "And Then There Were None."
Lalala, recap/thoughts for the episodes I've missed. ... well, two so far. One I skipped because I was spoiled for it and couldn't handle the death, not after "The French Mistake" made me feel like ripping my hair out at the wasted potential. And one got put aside for conference week. Anyway. On to the nonsense!
* Eve is really good at being a creeper and I appreciate that. … and she's macking on a Christian trucker dude.
* "A mother would never abandon her children like He did. Can I tell you a secret?" … and then she vomits a brain-worm in his ear. Which makes him slaughter his wife with a hammer. … Badass.
* "Nest of vamps. Werewolf dance party. Shifters - six of 'em, two-hundred died taking 'em out. Ghouls. Ghouls. Ghoul-wraith smorgasbord."
* "Is it just me or is that a straight line down I-80?" I love Dean and his random knowledge of vagranty things.
* kfwrfetgh, oh god, poor trucker guy. … I really want to make a character who, like Sam, was raised in the life and entertained dreams of law school - but to become a legal advocate for people who were the victims, taking the rap for supernatural critters.
* "Maybe they're coming in for Mother's Day." Yep, they went there.
* "No, we're gonna turn tail and run, because we're in over our heads."
* RUFUS RUFUS RUFUS RUFUS RUFUS. I LOVE YOU RUFUS AND I DON'T WANT YOU TO BE DEAD. AND BOBBY/RUFUS. BOBFUS? BRUFUS? RUBBY? WHATEVER IT IS, I LOVE IT TO PIECES BECAUSE THEY'RE TOTALLY A SHIP THAT SHOULD HAPPEN IN FANON AT LEAST.
* Also, seeing Bobby without his hat is still really weird.
* "I really don't know why you have a driver's license." … so, hum. Wee/Teen!chesters + Bobby/John, featuring papa bear!John going OMGWTF after Bobby "just drives Sam and Dean to [X place]" and ickle!Sammy is all clinging to ickle!Dean and just NOT WANTING TO DIE.
* "Why don't you three get a room?" because neither of these people is Dean's BOYFRAAAAAAAN, Bobby. Duh.
* HI, GWEN. YOU'RE STILL MAD SEXY.
HI, CRAZY GRANDPA FUCKFACE. YOU'RE STILL A FUCKFACE.
* "I take it you know each other." "He's our grandfather." "Woah … somebody needs a hug." FUCK YOU SERA AND KRIPKE WHY DID YOU HAVE TO KILL HIM. WHY COULDN'T YOU LEAVE MY PRECIOUS BB RUFUS ALONE.
* Okay, so … I know Dean is being kind of unreasonable in trying to just up and murder Samuel in the face, but: a. I love it when Dean is unreasonable and flawed and broken; b. I greatly dislike Grandpa Fuckface … aside from his behavior this season (read: made of FAIL), I just … get really skewed out by him on a personal level. I tried rewatching "In the Beginning" a few times during conference week and senior week, and … even then, I just can't roll with Samuel. I just do not like him; and c. … okay, I get it, he loves Mary. But … dude was a-okay with letting Crowley do whatever to his grandsons, who are part-Campbell whether or not he likes the Winchester part and thus, are FAMILY and SHOULD BE TREATED AS SUCH. And for that reason, I'm perfectly fine with Dean busting a cap in his aged, baldheaded, jerktastic ass.
* "Sam, take Dean for a walk."
* "So, you're Samuel." "You must be the guy pretending to be their father." OKAY NO. YOU DO NOT FUCKING SAY THAT SHIT TO BOBBY SINGER. NO. I'M SORRY, BUT … JOHN SOLD HIS SOUL AND LEFT HIS SONS WITH A DOOR-HANDLE APOLOGY TO SAM ABOUT HOW THEY FIGHT ALL THE TIME AND "OH BTW, SON I RAISED AS A SOLDIER AND CONSTANTLY TREATED HORRIBLY REGARDLESS OF HIS CRIPPLING SELF-ESTEEM ISSUES (AS SEEN IN THE EPISODE WHERE HE ACTIVELY DID NOT GIVE A FUCK THAT HE WAS DYING - EVEN TRIED TO ARGUE AGAINST BEING SAVED - AND WHERE THE FUCK WAS I? WHO KNOWS. I JUST DIDN'T FEEL LIKE COMING TO BE A FATHER THAT DAY) - ANYWAY, DEAN, YOU MIGHT HAVE TO KILL SAM SOMETIME IN THE VAGUE FUTURE. LULZ BYE." SAM AND DEAN WINCHESTER HAVE A CLEAR AND OBVIOUS NEED FOR A FATHER AND BOBBY IS THE BEST DAMN POSSIBLE REPLACEMENT, OKAY? SO KINDLY FUCK THE FUCK OFF, SAMUEL, I'M SO VINDICTIVELY HAPPY YOU GET TO DIE IN THIS EPISODE.
* "Well somebody ought to." LOVES BOBBY.
* "You seem different." "I got my soul back, no thanks to you, I hear." oh, blah blah, implications that Samuel actually did something worthwhile. I'll believe it when I see it.
* "You know, I really hate to break up this little circle of love…." WHYYYYYYYYY. WHYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY. Why couldn't we just LET RUFUS LIVE?
* "She was here about ten thousand years ago and every freak that walks the earth can be traced back to her." … I want to believe that the origin of monsters was from Eve, Lilith, and Lucifer having mad sexytimes. So I'm going to. … I mean, I can even justify it with some half-assed, academic-ish bullcrap: Lucifer created Lilith, the first demon, by perverting a human soul. Granted that this fact is probably due in large part to SPN's budget, but … all the monsters manifest in some kind of human form or a perversion thereof, and we know that Kripke et al have at least read the SparkNotes version of Paradise Lost, wherein Lucifer gives birth to Sin (she springs, fully formed, from his head a la Zeus and Athena), rapes her, and she then gives birth to Death.
So let's posit that there's Adam and Lilith, and Lucifer gets pissed off at Daddy for various reasons, and he goes oh hey, Lilith, let's play. Now, Lilith's argument with Adam in the Alphabet of Ben Sira was over who would "lie beneath" during sex; Adam and Lilith both wanted to top; clearly, if Lucifer got there, he could have taught Lilith the Joy of Non-Missionary Sex (as Lilith and Samael, one of the figures in the Lucifer/Satan/"evil angels" group and widely regarded as another name for Lucifer, are supposed to be lovers, or at least were considered so by the time you got to the early Kabbalah of Rabbi Jacob ben Samuel ha-Kohen).
Then God makes Eve, who constantly gets the rap for "bringing death into the world" by listening to the Serpent (later conflated with Satan/Lucifer/et al) and eating the Forbidden Fruit and beguiling Adam into doing the same. This is NOT how the actual Bible story went - see Phyllis Trible's God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality - but it's how the story routinely gets interpreted due to how the rabbis interpreted it during the Hellenization of Israel and their attempts to assimilate into Greek culture. Then, Biblically, the line of Cain is supposed to give birth to monsters; Supernaturally, Cain and Abel are among the Winchesters' ancestors on John's side … which doesn't actually say that much, given genetic drift and so on - but, in the Bible, Adam and Eve had a third son after Abel died and Cain got exiled, Seth, who is basically the Bible's Adam Milligan/Winchester.
So I posit that, in SPN's version of the story, based on the "a mother would never abandon her children line," Eve had Seth, but she couldn't just let Cain go. Enter Lucifer and Lilith, who are intent on making sure that humanity fucking suffers; it's not said whether Dean or Sam is supposed to be Abel, but we can assume that Lucifer had the ability to use either one as a vessel because vessel-ship is passed through family lines (see, Jimmy and Claire), and if that's the case, then Lucifer would have been able to use Cain as a vessel, too. He and Lilith victimize Eve, but rather than creating a demon, the birth of the monsters and all the mixed contact with angelic/demonic essences, as well as being one of the three humans directly created by God, in his image, this process turns her into something else - something new. The Mother of All - including the mother of humanity, since she served her original purpose and then endured it being perverted.
Thus, it's likely that her deeper motivations (as in, those outside of and informing the apparent desire for the standard murder and mayhem that the SPN writers need her to have) are like Lucifer's and Lilith's: she really does believe that she's saving the world by getting out of Purgatory and raising her monstrous brethren and letting them run free, since the universal rules are broken now and she probably gives them some kind of power. She comes into conflict with the show's main cosmological view - i.e., that humans have their flaws (and lots of them) but are ultimately the best lot to have in the world because, when they're right, their range of experience is so much deeper and broader than the extremes that the monsters have, and they have so much more potential for good but that has to come with extreme potential for evil, too - She comes into conflict with that because she either doesn't think of humans as her children anymore, or is trying, in a sense, to terrorize them back into being her children instead of God's, since God is presumably off on a beach somewhere, drinking margaritas and chilling out with Becky and Death.
And on the use of sex to make this possible: Supernatural's opinion seems to be that sex is beautiful when the Winchesters are having it (unless it's with Ruby, in which case it's "self-destructing and calling it getting ready for prom" or however Sera phrased it); otherwise, though, it tends to lead to dying, Shifter babies, etc. So it fits with Supernatural that the monsters came from angel/demon/human sex.
* GWEN/DEAN IS BASICALLY CANON, OKAY? AND THEY'RE ONLY THIRD COUSINS. THAT'S NOT EVEN LEGALLY INCEST.
* …. CRIES FOREVER AND EVER AND EVER. NOT GWEN. WHY DID YOU TAKE HER FROM ME BEN AND SERA. WHY DO ALL THE LADIES ON THIS SHOW TURN EVIL OR DIE OR BOTH. … or are Tessa.
* "We're gonna find him alive, Samuel. Or I'm gonna put a bullet in your head." I LOVE YOU, SAMMYFACE WINCHESTERPANTS.
* mmmmm, montage of stalking set to ominous guitar and bass-driven music.
* WHY DOES RUFUS HAVE TO DIE THOUGH.
* MMMMMMMM, MEXICAN STANDOFF.
* … nnnngh, phallic symbols crawling into Dean's orifices.
* EVEN THE WORMS SUPPORT MY "MONSTERS AS CORRUPTION OF HUMANITY, HUMANITY AS PARAGON OF AWESOMENESS BEING MISLED BY VARIOUS INFLUENCES DRAWING THEM AWAY FROM THEIR TRUE NATURE AND THEIR INHERENT SOMETHING SPECIAL, TRYING TO DOMINATE THE HUMAN EXPERIENCE BY CUTTING OUT PARTS THAT SOME FIND DISTASTEFUL BUT IN THE END LOSING ALL OF WHAT MAKES THAT EXPERIENCE SPECIAL" THESIS. THEY WORK BY CRAWLING INTO HUMANS AND TAKING OVER. HOLY SHIT. HAVE I BEEN KRIPKE'D YET? BETWEEN THIS AND THE DRAGONS AND THE PHOENIX, I THINK I HAVE BEEN.
* Randomly, I still want there to be a Skinwalker who was a dog first, so when he's human, his thoughts are all things like, "I HAVE JUST MET YOU AND I LOVE YOU" and "FOOD FOOD FOOD FOOD I SMELL FOOD WHERE'S THE FOOD" and "SQUIRREL!"
* So. Rufus and Samuel. Hate-based eye-sexing.
* Bobby and Samuel would totally have hate-sex, too. But I don't want Grandpa fuck-face getting laid, period, so.
* God, Jared Padalecki is beautiful. I know it's a truth that doesn't need stating, as the man is a fucking Adonis … but the cinematography is being especially badass to his hair and his cheekbones in this episode.
* "Well, I got a dump-truck full of bupkis." Love you, Bobby.
* "Well, we sit on our thumbs or we go in guns blazin'." "Like Omaha?" "You know what? Screw you for bringin' up Omaha. That's just low." WHY WOULD YOU KILL RUFUS JUST AS WE GET TO HEAR HIS BACKSTORY? THAT IS JUST LOW, BEN AND SERA. MY CRIES. FOREVER.
* Dean and Sam are cornering their grandfather in a locker room. I smell a heart-warming family moment. / sarcasm.
* "Just because your Dr. Jekyll at the moment, doesn't mean you get all high and mighty. Remember, we spent a year together." "Yeah, I know. We're blood. And you still sold me out."
* "Trust me, what I did pales in comparison to what you did, on more than one occasion." I LOVE ROBO!SAM, THOUGH. I LOVE HIM AND HIS SOCIOPATHY TO PIECES. … I also love Hannibal Lecter, so this is no surprise.
* "I'm gonna be needing my gun back, Bobby." "Yeah, you think?" HUSBANDS OKAY.
* "Well, it was a good plan - except for the part where a monster definitely would not give up all his weapons." "Shut up." DEFINITELY HUSBANDS.
* Oh, fuck sticks. Gigantor Moose is separated from the pack. Bad things are going to happen to him, aren't they? D:
* The background music in the Stalking Sampa scene is also pretty fucking epic. … Is it a sitar-based track? It sounds like a sitar-based track - which is doubly fucking epic because the sitar was the musical basis for The Third Man as in the Orson Welles / Joseph Cotten film noir written by Graham Greene and set in post-WW2 Vienna - fucking awesome film, easily one of the best ever made. I mean fucking ever.
* "Mary's still my daughter, and you're still named after me."
* BOOM HEADSHOT. I LOVE YOU SAMMY. I LOVE YOU SO SO MUCH, YOU BEAUTIFUL WONDERFUL BOY. PLEASE DON'T BE WORMED.
* … god. Jared is so pretty. And they're putting him in HANDCUFFS.
* "Bobby, you got a cranial saw in the car?" "*scoffs* 'Course." Why are Brofus so fucking awesome? WHY DID RUFUS HAVE TO FUCKING DIE?
* "I want you and you to wa- … Okay. I want you and you to watch him and him, and … Alright! If anything crawls out of anybodies, somebody step on it!"
* ~* Heartwarming Brotherly Moment *~ "I barely remember him, and what I do remember, it's not good … and what he did to us … but-" "There's a but?"
* "You know what I think Mom would say? She'd say 'just because you're blood doesn't make you family'. You gotta earn that." This quote is so relevant to my life, I have lost my ability to even.
* "We're about to crack open your Bobby, I love it when you get all paternal with them. ♥
* ~* HEARTWARMING BROMANCE MOMENT *~ … okay, not so heartwarming. "It was my fault, Omaha." … "I never said I'm sorry, Rufus. You lost her because of me and-" "I said we've had this conversation before, Bobby. And you can blabber all day, but it wouldn't change a thing, Bobby." LADIES, GENTLEMEN, PERSONS OF NON-BINARY GENDER IDENTITIES, CAN WE JUST HAVE A MOMENT OF STEVEN WILLIAMS APPRECIATION RIGHT NOW? SERIOUSLY. ALL OF THE ACTING AWARDS. ALL OF THE AWARDS FOR HEARTBREAK.
* "I'll never forgive you for what happened, you got that? Never. So change the subject, Bob." kefwfjhsdgfrhgrg, RUFUS YOU ARE BREAKING MY HEART FOREVER AND EVER PLEASE DON'T DIE. PRETTY PLEASE? I NEED YOU IN MY LIFE.
* HOLY SHIT REANIMATED SAMPA.
* BATTLE OF THE GUEST STARS.
* SAM KICKS DOWN THE DOOR OR TRIES TO.
* PIKACHU USED THUNDERBOLT - IT'S SUPER EFFECTIVE! … in this case, Pikachu is an electrical socket, but my point remains the same.
* TEAM BRO YAY KICKS DOWN THE DOOR TOGETHER.
* "Well, it can't be my afterlife. The three of you are here." RUUUUFUUUUUUS. *SOBBING FOREVER*
* "Define a hundred." Oh, Dean. Your smart alecky equivocation gives me hope for myself sometimes.
* okay, the ear checking looks really silly.
* bahahahahahahahaha, Sam and Dean were totally the kids who gave John and Bobby headaches by trying to stick various things into electrical sockets.
* "Ooookay, I'm not a doctor, but I'm gonna go ahead and call this one."
* … I love that this scene is so heavily inspired by the jumping blood scene from The Thing. JOHN CARPENTER APPRECIATION LIFE~
* "Since Bush Junior, term one." Rufus has a pacemaker and is down three toes. … The implication being diabetes and heart problems? lol, what you have to look forward to if you're a hunter and you live to be his age - one more reminder of how much the hunting life fucking sucks, and it's a subtle one for once.
* BOBBY NO. RUFUS NO. BOBBY'S INFECTED AND THE ALIEN BRAIN-MUNCHER WORM JUST KILLED RUFUS AND AND AND AND ALL OF THE TEARS FOREVER.
* "Well, hey there, you little herpe…" … um, I heard "harpy," albeit Jensen mispronouncing it a little, but then there's: "Why do you keep talkin' about herpes?" "I don't! Shut up! … Shut up!" - A VERY GOOD QUESTION, SAMMY. WHY DOES DEAN KEEP TALKING ABOUT HERPES. I know the fandom's already beat this to death, but honestly, I think Dean just talks about herpes because he's got the mind of a horny thirteen-year-old boy sometimes: "herpes" sounds funny and is an STD, therefore, it is funny.
* "You haven't got a name for me yet. I'm new around here. Eve cooked me up herself." … well, it looked like she puked you up, actually, but … sure. Fine. Cooking sounds more dignified, I guess. Also: mad props to the fucking sound designers on this episode. SERIOUSLY. EVERYTHING IS SPOT-ON PERFECT, from the background noise to the sound effects, and the distortion of Jim Beaver's voice to be the brain-munch murder worm is just … nnnngh, so good.
* "The mother of all of us and the end of all of you. By the time she's done, there'll be more creatures than humans - you'll live in pens. We'll serve up your young and call it veal." - very nice dig at veal farming. I appreciate that.
* "What's your deal in all of this? How's jumping a few truckers going to help?" "You think I'm here to mess with a couple cannery workers? We led you here." "Why?" - REALLY, SAMMY? REALLY? I mean, I know the wall's up and whatever, but … dude. The answer, on the meta-level, is that you're the protagonists; if shit isn't happening to you, it's happening to get to you - or, more lately, it's happening to Castiel, who is also one of Our Heroes and, as we've found out lately, if shit's happening off-screen, it leads to even worse shit. And on the surface-level, because you're the fucking Vessels of the Apocalypse, dude, come on. You averted the whole thing, too, which led directly to Eve being able to come up from Purgatory, and you pose the biggest threat to her being able to do her shit. I mean, really.
* "She's got a message for you. … You're all gonna die. She's pissed. She's here. And it's gonna be nothing but pain for you from here on in." … okay, no … So. In my response to "My Heart Will Go On," I had to comment on the fact that the Cas/Balthazar/Atropos cluster-fuck elements of the episode were really more meta than "The French Mistake," and in a much more effective way, because rather than going, "nudge nudge, wink wink, lol, oh yeah there's a plot" like TFM, this is actually a really brilliant description of the season's trajectory, post-6x16, and you know what? It's all coming from maternal rage, not entirely unlike how Sera has a big draw to episodes where Sam and Dean suffer (see, writing "Faith," "Nightmare," "Heart," "All Hell Breaks Loose, part one," "Dream A Little Dream Of Me," "Jus in Bello," "Time Is On My Side," "I Know What You Did Last Summer," "When The Levee Breaks," "The Song Remains The Same" (with Nancy Werner), "Two Minutes to Midnight," "Exile on Main Street," "Appointment in Samarra," and "Let It Bleed").
* Also, a-yep. That's how it works. Eve has disowned humanity as her children - whether or not it's actually like how I want it to be, something must have come along to change her and pervert her from her original purpose. Monsters are perversions of humanity that go to extremes while forsaking all of the potential for good in exchange for power that humans are capable of defeating, albeit most often by going to extreme measures.
* Okay, so this scene squicks me a little bit, mostly because it's such a casual depiction of Dean being willing to go back to torturing. And I love that Sam stepped in to be the voice of empathy - and the art direction of the brain-munch worm dying inside of him … but. … Fuck's sake, Supernatural. Dean torturing in Hell was a BIG DEAL. Dean and Alastair WERE A BIG DEAL. THAT WAS IMPORTANT CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT, AND EVEN THOUGH IT'S INFERABLE THAT HE'S WILLING TO TORTURE ONLY BECAUSE OF HOW MUCH BOBBY MEANS TO HIM, IS IT SO MUCH FOR US TO ASK THAT YOU PRETTY PLEASE ACKNOWLEDGE THE TROUBLE HE SHOULD HAVE WITH IT INSTEAD OF RESORTING TO "WELL, DEAN KNOWS THAT THE JOB HAS TO GET DONE."
* "Well, he didn't exactly keep kosher. He always used to pull the old 'can't work on the Sabbath' card whenever we had to bury a body. … You know, I was just a job. I was Joe Mechanic. When my wife got possessed, went nuts on me, I stabbed her and that didn't stop it, and next thing I knew, this guy busts in, douses her with holy water, sends that demon back to Hell so fast … I'd've gone away for killing her. But Rufus cleaned up everything. Taught me a thing or two about what's really out there. Pretty soon, we were riding together. Worked like that for years. Kinda like you two knuckleheads. … It was Omaha. It was my fault. And he never let it go."
"Well, he should have."
"You don't know what I did, Dean."
"Doesn't matter. … It means, at the end of the day, you two are family. Life's short. Our's are shorter than most. We're gonna spend it wringing our hands? … Something's gonna get us, eventually. And when my guts get ripped out, just so you two know? We're good. Blanket apology for all the crap that anybody's done, all the way around."
* BETWEEN THIS AND THE JOHNNIE WALKER AND BOBBY AND AND AND DSKFWJRGHRG. THIS FAMILY IS BREAKING MY HEART YOU GUYS. SERIOUSLY. I MEAN SERIOUSLY. SO MUCH HEART BREAKING.
* AND WHY DID RUFUS HAVE TO FUCKING DIE. CRIES FOREVER.
* okay, onto the recap of "Mommy Dearest."
* Eve is really good at being a creeper and I appreciate that. … and she's macking on a Christian trucker dude.
* "A mother would never abandon her children like He did. Can I tell you a secret?" … and then she vomits a brain-worm in his ear. Which makes him slaughter his wife with a hammer. … Badass.
* "Nest of vamps. Werewolf dance party. Shifters - six of 'em, two-hundred died taking 'em out. Ghouls. Ghouls. Ghoul-wraith smorgasbord."
* "Is it just me or is that a straight line down I-80?" I love Dean and his random knowledge of vagranty things.
* kfwrfetgh, oh god, poor trucker guy. … I really want to make a character who, like Sam, was raised in the life and entertained dreams of law school - but to become a legal advocate for people who were the victims, taking the rap for supernatural critters.
* "Maybe they're coming in for Mother's Day." Yep, they went there.
* "No, we're gonna turn tail and run, because we're in over our heads."
* RUFUS RUFUS RUFUS RUFUS RUFUS. I LOVE YOU RUFUS AND I DON'T WANT YOU TO BE DEAD. AND BOBBY/RUFUS. BOBFUS? BRUFUS? RUBBY? WHATEVER IT IS, I LOVE IT TO PIECES BECAUSE THEY'RE TOTALLY A SHIP THAT SHOULD HAPPEN IN FANON AT LEAST.
* Also, seeing Bobby without his hat is still really weird.
* "I really don't know why you have a driver's license." … so, hum. Wee/Teen!chesters + Bobby/John, featuring papa bear!John going OMGWTF after Bobby "just drives Sam and Dean to [X place]" and ickle!Sammy is all clinging to ickle!Dean and just NOT WANTING TO DIE.
* "Why don't you three get a room?" because neither of these people is Dean's BOYFRAAAAAAAN, Bobby. Duh.
* HI, GWEN. YOU'RE STILL MAD SEXY.
HI, CRAZY GRANDPA FUCKFACE. YOU'RE STILL A FUCKFACE.
* "I take it you know each other." "He's our grandfather." "Woah … somebody needs a hug." FUCK YOU SERA AND KRIPKE WHY DID YOU HAVE TO KILL HIM. WHY COULDN'T YOU LEAVE MY PRECIOUS BB RUFUS ALONE.
* Okay, so … I know Dean is being kind of unreasonable in trying to just up and murder Samuel in the face, but: a. I love it when Dean is unreasonable and flawed and broken; b. I greatly dislike Grandpa Fuckface … aside from his behavior this season (read: made of FAIL), I just … get really skewed out by him on a personal level. I tried rewatching "In the Beginning" a few times during conference week and senior week, and … even then, I just can't roll with Samuel. I just do not like him; and c. … okay, I get it, he loves Mary. But … dude was a-okay with letting Crowley do whatever to his grandsons, who are part-Campbell whether or not he likes the Winchester part and thus, are FAMILY and SHOULD BE TREATED AS SUCH. And for that reason, I'm perfectly fine with Dean busting a cap in his aged, baldheaded, jerktastic ass.
* "Sam, take Dean for a walk."
* "So, you're Samuel." "You must be the guy pretending to be their father." OKAY NO. YOU DO NOT FUCKING SAY THAT SHIT TO BOBBY SINGER. NO. I'M SORRY, BUT … JOHN SOLD HIS SOUL AND LEFT HIS SONS WITH A DOOR-HANDLE APOLOGY TO SAM ABOUT HOW THEY FIGHT ALL THE TIME AND "OH BTW, SON I RAISED AS A SOLDIER AND CONSTANTLY TREATED HORRIBLY REGARDLESS OF HIS CRIPPLING SELF-ESTEEM ISSUES (AS SEEN IN THE EPISODE WHERE HE ACTIVELY DID NOT GIVE A FUCK THAT HE WAS DYING - EVEN TRIED TO ARGUE AGAINST BEING SAVED - AND WHERE THE FUCK WAS I? WHO KNOWS. I JUST DIDN'T FEEL LIKE COMING TO BE A FATHER THAT DAY) - ANYWAY, DEAN, YOU MIGHT HAVE TO KILL SAM SOMETIME IN THE VAGUE FUTURE. LULZ BYE." SAM AND DEAN WINCHESTER HAVE A CLEAR AND OBVIOUS NEED FOR A FATHER AND BOBBY IS THE BEST DAMN POSSIBLE REPLACEMENT, OKAY? SO KINDLY FUCK THE FUCK OFF, SAMUEL, I'M SO VINDICTIVELY HAPPY YOU GET TO DIE IN THIS EPISODE.
* "Well somebody ought to." LOVES BOBBY.
* "You seem different." "I got my soul back, no thanks to you, I hear." oh, blah blah, implications that Samuel actually did something worthwhile. I'll believe it when I see it.
* "You know, I really hate to break up this little circle of love…." WHYYYYYYYYY. WHYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY. Why couldn't we just LET RUFUS LIVE?
* "She was here about ten thousand years ago and every freak that walks the earth can be traced back to her." … I want to believe that the origin of monsters was from Eve, Lilith, and Lucifer having mad sexytimes. So I'm going to. … I mean, I can even justify it with some half-assed, academic-ish bullcrap: Lucifer created Lilith, the first demon, by perverting a human soul. Granted that this fact is probably due in large part to SPN's budget, but … all the monsters manifest in some kind of human form or a perversion thereof, and we know that Kripke et al have at least read the SparkNotes version of Paradise Lost, wherein Lucifer gives birth to Sin (she springs, fully formed, from his head a la Zeus and Athena), rapes her, and she then gives birth to Death.
So let's posit that there's Adam and Lilith, and Lucifer gets pissed off at Daddy for various reasons, and he goes oh hey, Lilith, let's play. Now, Lilith's argument with Adam in the Alphabet of Ben Sira was over who would "lie beneath" during sex; Adam and Lilith both wanted to top; clearly, if Lucifer got there, he could have taught Lilith the Joy of Non-Missionary Sex (as Lilith and Samael, one of the figures in the Lucifer/Satan/"evil angels" group and widely regarded as another name for Lucifer, are supposed to be lovers, or at least were considered so by the time you got to the early Kabbalah of Rabbi Jacob ben Samuel ha-Kohen).
Then God makes Eve, who constantly gets the rap for "bringing death into the world" by listening to the Serpent (later conflated with Satan/Lucifer/et al) and eating the Forbidden Fruit and beguiling Adam into doing the same. This is NOT how the actual Bible story went - see Phyllis Trible's God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality - but it's how the story routinely gets interpreted due to how the rabbis interpreted it during the Hellenization of Israel and their attempts to assimilate into Greek culture. Then, Biblically, the line of Cain is supposed to give birth to monsters; Supernaturally, Cain and Abel are among the Winchesters' ancestors on John's side … which doesn't actually say that much, given genetic drift and so on - but, in the Bible, Adam and Eve had a third son after Abel died and Cain got exiled, Seth, who is basically the Bible's Adam Milligan/Winchester.
So I posit that, in SPN's version of the story, based on the "a mother would never abandon her children line," Eve had Seth, but she couldn't just let Cain go. Enter Lucifer and Lilith, who are intent on making sure that humanity fucking suffers; it's not said whether Dean or Sam is supposed to be Abel, but we can assume that Lucifer had the ability to use either one as a vessel because vessel-ship is passed through family lines (see, Jimmy and Claire), and if that's the case, then Lucifer would have been able to use Cain as a vessel, too. He and Lilith victimize Eve, but rather than creating a demon, the birth of the monsters and all the mixed contact with angelic/demonic essences, as well as being one of the three humans directly created by God, in his image, this process turns her into something else - something new. The Mother of All - including the mother of humanity, since she served her original purpose and then endured it being perverted.
Thus, it's likely that her deeper motivations (as in, those outside of and informing the apparent desire for the standard murder and mayhem that the SPN writers need her to have) are like Lucifer's and Lilith's: she really does believe that she's saving the world by getting out of Purgatory and raising her monstrous brethren and letting them run free, since the universal rules are broken now and she probably gives them some kind of power. She comes into conflict with the show's main cosmological view - i.e., that humans have their flaws (and lots of them) but are ultimately the best lot to have in the world because, when they're right, their range of experience is so much deeper and broader than the extremes that the monsters have, and they have so much more potential for good but that has to come with extreme potential for evil, too - She comes into conflict with that because she either doesn't think of humans as her children anymore, or is trying, in a sense, to terrorize them back into being her children instead of God's, since God is presumably off on a beach somewhere, drinking margaritas and chilling out with Becky and Death.
And on the use of sex to make this possible: Supernatural's opinion seems to be that sex is beautiful when the Winchesters are having it (unless it's with Ruby, in which case it's "self-destructing and calling it getting ready for prom" or however Sera phrased it); otherwise, though, it tends to lead to dying, Shifter babies, etc. So it fits with Supernatural that the monsters came from angel/demon/human sex.
* GWEN/DEAN IS BASICALLY CANON, OKAY? AND THEY'RE ONLY THIRD COUSINS. THAT'S NOT EVEN LEGALLY INCEST.
* …. CRIES FOREVER AND EVER AND EVER. NOT GWEN. WHY DID YOU TAKE HER FROM ME BEN AND SERA. WHY DO ALL THE LADIES ON THIS SHOW TURN EVIL OR DIE OR BOTH. … or are Tessa.
* "We're gonna find him alive, Samuel. Or I'm gonna put a bullet in your head." I LOVE YOU, SAMMYFACE WINCHESTERPANTS.
* mmmmm, montage of stalking set to ominous guitar and bass-driven music.
* WHY DOES RUFUS HAVE TO DIE THOUGH.
* MMMMMMMM, MEXICAN STANDOFF.
* … nnnngh, phallic symbols crawling into Dean's orifices.
* EVEN THE WORMS SUPPORT MY "MONSTERS AS CORRUPTION OF HUMANITY, HUMANITY AS PARAGON OF AWESOMENESS BEING MISLED BY VARIOUS INFLUENCES DRAWING THEM AWAY FROM THEIR TRUE NATURE AND THEIR INHERENT SOMETHING SPECIAL, TRYING TO DOMINATE THE HUMAN EXPERIENCE BY CUTTING OUT PARTS THAT SOME FIND DISTASTEFUL BUT IN THE END LOSING ALL OF WHAT MAKES THAT EXPERIENCE SPECIAL" THESIS. THEY WORK BY CRAWLING INTO HUMANS AND TAKING OVER. HOLY SHIT. HAVE I BEEN KRIPKE'D YET? BETWEEN THIS AND THE DRAGONS AND THE PHOENIX, I THINK I HAVE BEEN.
* Randomly, I still want there to be a Skinwalker who was a dog first, so when he's human, his thoughts are all things like, "I HAVE JUST MET YOU AND I LOVE YOU" and "FOOD FOOD FOOD FOOD I SMELL FOOD WHERE'S THE FOOD" and "SQUIRREL!"
* So. Rufus and Samuel. Hate-based eye-sexing.
* Bobby and Samuel would totally have hate-sex, too. But I don't want Grandpa fuck-face getting laid, period, so.
* God, Jared Padalecki is beautiful. I know it's a truth that doesn't need stating, as the man is a fucking Adonis … but the cinematography is being especially badass to his hair and his cheekbones in this episode.
* "Well, I got a dump-truck full of bupkis." Love you, Bobby.
* "Well, we sit on our thumbs or we go in guns blazin'." "Like Omaha?" "You know what? Screw you for bringin' up Omaha. That's just low." WHY WOULD YOU KILL RUFUS JUST AS WE GET TO HEAR HIS BACKSTORY? THAT IS JUST LOW, BEN AND SERA. MY CRIES. FOREVER.
* Dean and Sam are cornering their grandfather in a locker room. I smell a heart-warming family moment. / sarcasm.
* "Just because your Dr. Jekyll at the moment, doesn't mean you get all high and mighty. Remember, we spent a year together." "Yeah, I know. We're blood. And you still sold me out."
* "Trust me, what I did pales in comparison to what you did, on more than one occasion." I LOVE ROBO!SAM, THOUGH. I LOVE HIM AND HIS SOCIOPATHY TO PIECES. … I also love Hannibal Lecter, so this is no surprise.
* "I'm gonna be needing my gun back, Bobby." "Yeah, you think?" HUSBANDS OKAY.
* "Well, it was a good plan - except for the part where a monster definitely would not give up all his weapons." "Shut up." DEFINITELY HUSBANDS.
* Oh, fuck sticks. Gigantor Moose is separated from the pack. Bad things are going to happen to him, aren't they? D:
* The background music in the Stalking Sampa scene is also pretty fucking epic. … Is it a sitar-based track? It sounds like a sitar-based track - which is doubly fucking epic because the sitar was the musical basis for The Third Man as in the Orson Welles / Joseph Cotten film noir written by Graham Greene and set in post-WW2 Vienna - fucking awesome film, easily one of the best ever made. I mean fucking ever.
* "Mary's still my daughter, and you're still named after me."
* BOOM HEADSHOT. I LOVE YOU SAMMY. I LOVE YOU SO SO MUCH, YOU BEAUTIFUL WONDERFUL BOY. PLEASE DON'T BE WORMED.
* … god. Jared is so pretty. And they're putting him in HANDCUFFS.
* "Bobby, you got a cranial saw in the car?" "*scoffs* 'Course." Why are Brofus so fucking awesome? WHY DID RUFUS HAVE TO FUCKING DIE?
* "I want you and you to wa- … Okay. I want you and you to watch him and him, and … Alright! If anything crawls out of anybodies, somebody step on it!"
* ~* Heartwarming Brotherly Moment *~ "I barely remember him, and what I do remember, it's not good … and what he did to us … but-" "There's a but?"
* "You know what I think Mom would say? She'd say 'just because you're blood doesn't make you family'. You gotta earn that." This quote is so relevant to my life, I have lost my ability to even.
* "We're about to crack open your Bobby, I love it when you get all paternal with them. ♥
* ~* HEARTWARMING BROMANCE MOMENT *~ … okay, not so heartwarming. "It was my fault, Omaha." … "I never said I'm sorry, Rufus. You lost her because of me and-" "I said we've had this conversation before, Bobby. And you can blabber all day, but it wouldn't change a thing, Bobby." LADIES, GENTLEMEN, PERSONS OF NON-BINARY GENDER IDENTITIES, CAN WE JUST HAVE A MOMENT OF STEVEN WILLIAMS APPRECIATION RIGHT NOW? SERIOUSLY. ALL OF THE ACTING AWARDS. ALL OF THE AWARDS FOR HEARTBREAK.
* "I'll never forgive you for what happened, you got that? Never. So change the subject, Bob." kefwfjhsdgfrhgrg, RUFUS YOU ARE BREAKING MY HEART FOREVER AND EVER PLEASE DON'T DIE. PRETTY PLEASE? I NEED YOU IN MY LIFE.
* HOLY SHIT REANIMATED SAMPA.
* BATTLE OF THE GUEST STARS.
* SAM KICKS DOWN THE DOOR OR TRIES TO.
* PIKACHU USED THUNDERBOLT - IT'S SUPER EFFECTIVE! … in this case, Pikachu is an electrical socket, but my point remains the same.
* TEAM BRO YAY KICKS DOWN THE DOOR TOGETHER.
* "Well, it can't be my afterlife. The three of you are here." RUUUUFUUUUUUS. *SOBBING FOREVER*
* "Define a hundred." Oh, Dean. Your smart alecky equivocation gives me hope for myself sometimes.
* okay, the ear checking looks really silly.
* bahahahahahahahaha, Sam and Dean were totally the kids who gave John and Bobby headaches by trying to stick various things into electrical sockets.
* "Ooookay, I'm not a doctor, but I'm gonna go ahead and call this one."
* … I love that this scene is so heavily inspired by the jumping blood scene from The Thing. JOHN CARPENTER APPRECIATION LIFE~
* "Since Bush Junior, term one." Rufus has a pacemaker and is down three toes. … The implication being diabetes and heart problems? lol, what you have to look forward to if you're a hunter and you live to be his age - one more reminder of how much the hunting life fucking sucks, and it's a subtle one for once.
* BOBBY NO. RUFUS NO. BOBBY'S INFECTED AND THE ALIEN BRAIN-MUNCHER WORM JUST KILLED RUFUS AND AND AND AND ALL OF THE TEARS FOREVER.
* "Well, hey there, you little herpe…" … um, I heard "harpy," albeit Jensen mispronouncing it a little, but then there's: "Why do you keep talkin' about herpes?" "I don't! Shut up! … Shut up!" - A VERY GOOD QUESTION, SAMMY. WHY DOES DEAN KEEP TALKING ABOUT HERPES. I know the fandom's already beat this to death, but honestly, I think Dean just talks about herpes because he's got the mind of a horny thirteen-year-old boy sometimes: "herpes" sounds funny and is an STD, therefore, it is funny.
* "You haven't got a name for me yet. I'm new around here. Eve cooked me up herself." … well, it looked like she puked you up, actually, but … sure. Fine. Cooking sounds more dignified, I guess. Also: mad props to the fucking sound designers on this episode. SERIOUSLY. EVERYTHING IS SPOT-ON PERFECT, from the background noise to the sound effects, and the distortion of Jim Beaver's voice to be the brain-munch murder worm is just … nnnngh, so good.
* "The mother of all of us and the end of all of you. By the time she's done, there'll be more creatures than humans - you'll live in pens. We'll serve up your young and call it veal." - very nice dig at veal farming. I appreciate that.
* "What's your deal in all of this? How's jumping a few truckers going to help?" "You think I'm here to mess with a couple cannery workers? We led you here." "Why?" - REALLY, SAMMY? REALLY? I mean, I know the wall's up and whatever, but … dude. The answer, on the meta-level, is that you're the protagonists; if shit isn't happening to you, it's happening to get to you - or, more lately, it's happening to Castiel, who is also one of Our Heroes and, as we've found out lately, if shit's happening off-screen, it leads to even worse shit. And on the surface-level, because you're the fucking Vessels of the Apocalypse, dude, come on. You averted the whole thing, too, which led directly to Eve being able to come up from Purgatory, and you pose the biggest threat to her being able to do her shit. I mean, really.
* "She's got a message for you. … You're all gonna die. She's pissed. She's here. And it's gonna be nothing but pain for you from here on in." … okay, no … So. In my response to "My Heart Will Go On," I had to comment on the fact that the Cas/Balthazar/Atropos cluster-fuck elements of the episode were really more meta than "The French Mistake," and in a much more effective way, because rather than going, "nudge nudge, wink wink, lol, oh yeah there's a plot" like TFM, this is actually a really brilliant description of the season's trajectory, post-6x16, and you know what? It's all coming from maternal rage, not entirely unlike how Sera has a big draw to episodes where Sam and Dean suffer (see, writing "Faith," "Nightmare," "Heart," "All Hell Breaks Loose, part one," "Dream A Little Dream Of Me," "Jus in Bello," "Time Is On My Side," "I Know What You Did Last Summer," "When The Levee Breaks," "The Song Remains The Same" (with Nancy Werner), "Two Minutes to Midnight," "Exile on Main Street," "Appointment in Samarra," and "Let It Bleed").
* Also, a-yep. That's how it works. Eve has disowned humanity as her children - whether or not it's actually like how I want it to be, something must have come along to change her and pervert her from her original purpose. Monsters are perversions of humanity that go to extremes while forsaking all of the potential for good in exchange for power that humans are capable of defeating, albeit most often by going to extreme measures.
* Okay, so this scene squicks me a little bit, mostly because it's such a casual depiction of Dean being willing to go back to torturing. And I love that Sam stepped in to be the voice of empathy - and the art direction of the brain-munch worm dying inside of him … but. … Fuck's sake, Supernatural. Dean torturing in Hell was a BIG DEAL. Dean and Alastair WERE A BIG DEAL. THAT WAS IMPORTANT CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT, AND EVEN THOUGH IT'S INFERABLE THAT HE'S WILLING TO TORTURE ONLY BECAUSE OF HOW MUCH BOBBY MEANS TO HIM, IS IT SO MUCH FOR US TO ASK THAT YOU PRETTY PLEASE ACKNOWLEDGE THE TROUBLE HE SHOULD HAVE WITH IT INSTEAD OF RESORTING TO "WELL, DEAN KNOWS THAT THE JOB HAS TO GET DONE."
* "Well, he didn't exactly keep kosher. He always used to pull the old 'can't work on the Sabbath' card whenever we had to bury a body. … You know, I was just a job. I was Joe Mechanic. When my wife got possessed, went nuts on me, I stabbed her and that didn't stop it, and next thing I knew, this guy busts in, douses her with holy water, sends that demon back to Hell so fast … I'd've gone away for killing her. But Rufus cleaned up everything. Taught me a thing or two about what's really out there. Pretty soon, we were riding together. Worked like that for years. Kinda like you two knuckleheads. … It was Omaha. It was my fault. And he never let it go."
"Well, he should have."
"You don't know what I did, Dean."
"Doesn't matter. … It means, at the end of the day, you two are family. Life's short. Our's are shorter than most. We're gonna spend it wringing our hands? … Something's gonna get us, eventually. And when my guts get ripped out, just so you two know? We're good. Blanket apology for all the crap that anybody's done, all the way around."
* BETWEEN THIS AND THE JOHNNIE WALKER AND BOBBY AND AND AND DSKFWJRGHRG. THIS FAMILY IS BREAKING MY HEART YOU GUYS. SERIOUSLY. I MEAN SERIOUSLY. SO MUCH HEART BREAKING.
* AND WHY DID RUFUS HAVE TO FUCKING DIE. CRIES FOREVER.
* okay, onto the recap of "Mommy Dearest."